Unexpected caregiver help from the cleaning lady

My 89-year-old father (Pops) is not what you would call neat. He seems to positively like clutter and resists attempts to “simplify his life” by picking things up and putting them away. As a result, things tend to pile up. For example, my oldest daughter graduated from high school in 2000. As of last week, my father still had her graduation program on his coffee table.

I am permitted to go through and dispose of the really old junk mail (just to prevent it from burying the recent mail), but he starts to get edgy if I begin to get too “fussy” and wash and stack his dishes. He will eventually get to them, he insists. (Part of this particular resistance, I think, is an old school aversion to men doing dishes.)

Recently, my father got a new cleaning lady named Sandy, who also lives in the senior citizen housing where he lives. She is not his first cleaning lady, but the others just stopped coming around, probably because they found it hard to clean around the clutter and wouldn’t buck my father’s professed preference for clutter.

So you can imagine my surprise when I visited my father to meet Sandy and found not only the clutter gone but the furniture completely rearranged. I surveyed the room in surprise and noticed a slight red-haired woman vigorously scrubbing down my father’s dinner table.

“Sandy, I want you to meet my older brother,” my father said (his standard introduction for me). Sandy gave me a quick smile, and I shook a hand that smelled like bleach. “She said she wanted to move a few things around, and next thing I know she’s dragging the couch across the room,” my father added.

“Bob, I do like this lighthouse placemat, but it’s getting to be a mess on the table,” Sandy interjected. “Let’s hang it up on the wall. Your son can help.”

A moment later, I was standing on a chair hanging the placemat up with duct tape.

So now my father’s apartment is a lot neater than it was. The funny thing is now he claims to like it this way.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeff Muise

Jeff is a HealthTalk employee and a caregiver for his 90-year-old father, Robert in Woodstock, in New York’s Catskill Mountain region. He and his wife Deborah have two grown daughters, Amanda, and Molly. Jeff...read more

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